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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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The Waste Land
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(1922) Poem by T.S. *Eliot which has come to symbolize a mood of lively unease in the period after World War I. In its deliberate fragmentation ('These fragments I have shored against my ruins') it juxtaposes literary allusion and commonplace everyday remarks, resulting in a sort of cubist collage of the jazz age. The poem consists of five sections – 'The Burial of the Dead', 'A Game of Chess', 'The Fire Sermon', the very brief 'Death by Water', and 'What the Thunder Said'.
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When Eliot published it as a book (it had appeared in magazines earlier in 1922), he padded it out with learned notes about his sources. He later dismissed these as 'bogus scholarship', but they have added to the pleasure of researchers in exploring the poem. They revealed that his main inspiration, and the origin of the title, was a book about the legend of the *Holy Grail (Jessie Weston From Ritual to Romance 1920). The poem is dedicated to a fellow poet, Ezra Pound, whose advice had led to the original draft being greatly shortened.
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